The Arkansas Retro Expo brought together game and vintage tech enthusiasts and vendors on Saturday for the second time in its short history.
Brandon Woltse — known as Arkansas Picker by his YouTube subscribers — said he set out to organize the convention’s 2023 inaugural event in Hot Springs after seeing the need for such an event and deciding to fill it.
“Last year, I started going to conventions, and I saw there wasn’t one like this in Arkansas,” Woltse said.
Woltse said the convention started as a failed swap-meet in Bentonville that fell through due to complications finding a venue. The following attempt became the Arkansas Retro Expo, which drew a crowd of around 500 attendees last year with some vendors clearing over $1,000 in sales. This year, Woltse said the crowd was over 600.
“Almost everybody that vended with me cleared over $1,000,” Woltse said. “As a vendor you want to make sure that you clear at least a thousand in sales.”
Woltse said he plans on returning to the Hot Springs convention center for the Arkansas Retro Expo 2025.
The expo on Saturday featured numerous vendors selling a diverse selection of video game memorabilia and tech, as well as valuable merchandise from a variety of gaming franchises. Crowds of people wound their way through a network of pop-up stores to browse the collections organized around a densely packed hotel event space.
Heather Linderman — owner of Pixel Parts, an online video game memorabilia store — was selling unique art pieces that featured game controllers disassembled and presented in shadow box picture frames. Linderman said she creates the pieces with design backgrounds that she makes herself.
Kayla Whillock, a swim instructor and part-time internet streamer, participates in conventions like the Retro Expo all over the country. Whillock said she had just arrived in Arkansas after attending a convention in San Francisco.
Whillock was selling merchandise and playing cards from the trading card game Pokémon. One card she picked up from the table was marked for $70. She said it could fetch a price of over $1,000 if she had the card’s quality verified by a specialized grading agency.
Whillock was also selling a 26-year-old pack of Pokémon bubble gum from 1999 depicting the character Brock and signed by one of the character’s voice actors. She was asking $100 for the item and said that fans in the ’90s would chew the gum and collect the wrappers which featured Pokémon characters.
Other vendors like Bill Bollig of Tuft Lucks was selling handmade rugs that featured logos and characters from popular franchises. “It started out as a hobby, but I realized I could probably sell these,” Bollig said.
Bollig said that the expo was a perfect place to make his business’ debut.
